Abstract

This chapter provides a critical approach to European civilisation in a way that avoids some of the traditional Eurocentric assumptions about the superiority of the West and simplistic assumptions about European heritage based on a common culture deriving from classical antiquity, Christianity, the Renaissance, and Enlightenment. It is also an approach that avoids some of the undifferentiated attacks on the idea of European civilisation as exclusively 'orientalist' in the sense of being defined exclusively in terms of a relation of superiority to the Orient.